Speaking up for Marilyn in the 60-year-old Sam Sheppard murder case: Brent Larkin

Updated Jul 3, 2014; Posted Jul 3, 2014

Sam Sheppard, with his arms around son Chip, left, and second wife Ariane, following his 1966 acquittal after a second trial. His lawyer F. Lee Bailey is at right.(Norbert J. Yassanye, Plain Dealer Historical Photograph Collection)

Greater Cleveland has been home to more than 10,000 homicides in the past 60 years. Many were in the news for weeks, a few for years. But only one grabbed the town's attention - and kept it - for nearly a half century.

But until O.J. Simpson got away with the 1994 killing of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and of Ronald Goldman, the murder of Marilyn Sheppard may have been the 20th century's most widely covered whodunit.

Syndicated columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, who covered the first trial for some of the nation's largest newspapers, wrote that the Sheppard case "ranked with" the 1892 murder trial of alleged ax murderer Lizzie Borden. Following the daily trial dispatches, Ernest Hemingway wrote from Havana, "A trial like this, with its elements of doubt, is the greatest human story of all .... This is the real thing. This trial has everything the public clamors for."

Indeed, it had sex, suburbia, money, power, intrigue, mystery, a pregnant and pretty young victim. And it came at a time when three daily newspapers were engaged in ferocious competition for reader attention in a prosperous central city and its booming suburbs.

Technically, the brutal murder of Marilyn Sheppard remains unsolved. But from the moment Patrolman Fred Drenkhan was dispatched to the Sheppard home at 5:57 a.m. that July 4 morning 60 years ago, until Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Bill Mason officially closed the books 48 years later, the identity of the primary suspect never once changed.

Evidence and common sense always pointed to one man, the right man. And three times - twice in person and once in absentia -- Dr. Sam Sheppard was tried for the brutal murder of his wife.

Sheppard, the 30-year-old Bay Village osteopath whose family founded and controlled the local hospital, was convicted in 1954 and shipped off to prison for life. The trial lasted eight weeks, with the most damning testimony coming from Sheppard and his utterly implausible version of what happened that night, including the two encounters with the bushy-haired man he invented as Marilyn's killer.

In 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court set aside the jury verdict, citing a climate of "inherently prejudicial publicity" and the trial judge's failure to "control disruptive influences in the courtroom." Later that year, with F. Lee Bailey as his lawyer, Sheppard was acquitted. He never took the stand.

As a free man, Sheppard became a professional wrestler, debuting as "Killer" Sam Sheppard. He died of liver failure in 1970.

On that night of the killing, seven-year-old Sam Reese Sheppard slept in a nearby bedroom when his mother was bludgeoned 35 times in what had all the earmarks of a crime of passion. Forty-five years later, Sam Reese Sheppard, ably represented by Cleveland lawyer Terry Gilbert, sought to clear his father's name by filing a wrongful-imprisonment suit against the state.

The rubber match was a mismatch. The trial took 10 weeks. A jury took all of three hours to unanimously conclude Sam Sheppard had not been wrongfully imprisoned for murder.

Assisted by Mason, Steve Dever was lead trial lawyer for the county in the third trial. During a career as prosecutor than spanned 25 years, Dever prosecuted more than 100 murder trials, many of them high-profile.

"But this is the case people always ask me about," said Dever. "This case involved what was basically an instantaneous eruption of events. And there was an extreme amount of pain and cruelty caused by the perpetrator against Marilyn Sheppard."

That pain, Dever believes, was inflicted by Sam Sheppard. Had the wrongful imprisonment trial been a criminal case, it's pretty clear the jury would have found Sheppard guilty. Nevertheless, Gilbert has never abandoned his minority view that his client's father didn't do it, insisting his case included "solid forensic proof ... that Sheppard could not have committed the insanely brutal beating of the wife he loved."

"But Cuyahoga County, even 60 years later, seems incapable [of cleaning] its dirty hands over how it ruined so many lives, including a young boy, who still suffers from that fateful night in 1954," added Gilbert.

Most of the prosecutors, police and journalists who covered or participated in the original investigation and trial are deceased. But enough are still around to establish a clear consensus.

Drenkhan, who later served eight years as Bay Village police chief, gave testimony during the first trial that helped unravel Sheppard's flimsy alibi.

"I think something popped inside him that night," Drenkhan, now 87, told me a few weeks ago. "I think he got so wrapped up in himself and his story that he talked himself into thinking he didn't do it."

By 1954, Doris O'Donnell was already one of the brightest stars in Cleveland journalism. The Sheppard case made her a superstar. O'Donnell knew the Sheppard family. She was the first to interview Sheppard's mistress. And she was the only journalist to cover all three trials.

O'Donnell, 93, still has little tolerance for anyone who thinks Sheppard might be innocent.

"It was a murder of elimination," she said. "He wanted to get rid of his wife."

Bill Tanner covered the first trial for The Cleveland Press and supervised coverage of the second. Tanner has little or no doubt about Sheppard's guilt. And he challenges the widely accepted notion, suggested in the Supreme Court ruling, that the Press crossed some journalistic fairness line in its coverage. Were it not for the Press' legendary editor, Louie Seltzer, Tanner thinks Sheppard would have gotten away with murder.

"Only Louie could have challenged the establishment the way he did on that case," said Tanner, now 89. "(The Sheppard family) owned Bay Village. All that evidence would have been swept aside."

In the days leading up to Sheppard's arrest, a front page headline in the Press demanded to know, "Who Speaks for Marilyn?"

In the 60 years since, a great many have done just that.

Brent Larkin was The Plain Dealer's editorial director from 1991 until his retirement in 2009.